Guy Lochhead, 22/07/10
American journalist and socialist/communist activist. A great believer in revolution, he travelled all over the world supporting the socialist, Mexican revolutionary and then Soviet cause. He was critical of the later communist policies, and began to lose faith in the movement. He died that same year of influenza and typhus. Throughout his career as a political activist, Reed was set apart from his contemporaries by the fact he was a writer. He wrote books about what he experienced, and can therefore be seen as a proto-New Journalist. He has been criticised as being overly romantic and a womaniser, and this is probably true, but he was a writer and a poet. His value was not so much as a political leader, but as a populist of the socialist/communist cause, and a link between the politicised American worker and what was going on in the East. I will include ’10 Days That Shook the World’.